A Design Sprint on a Budget
Learn how we reaped the benefits of a design sprint even though we have a tiny team and few resources.
Our team has considered running a Google Ventures-style design sprint to come up with creative solutions for some of the problems we’ve faced, but a five-day commitment from several team members was prohibitively expensive for us. As a resource-constrained non-profit with a small product team, we have to be especially prudent with how we use our time, so we decided to adapt this 2-hour design sprint to fit our needs (Full disclosure: Our full sprint took about 3 hours).
The Problem We Set Out to Solve
Plenty of websites let teachers raise money from their own social networks, but what makes DonorsChoose.org unique is that teachers on our site can reliably get funding from people they’ve never met. We help our teachers fundraise by emailing our donor network, we partner with foundations that will match donations to teachers’ project requests, and we constantly improve our site to make it easier for donors to give.
However, we learned that teachers often reported feeling like they had little support in getting their projects funded. This is a problem because if teachers aren’t aware of their funding sources and the work we do to bring money to their projects, they may opt to fundraise on a different crowdfunding site where their odds for success are much lower.
The Sprint
Our design sprint was broken up into three sections: Understand,
Sketch, and Prototype.
We had four people on our sprint team: a product designer (that’s me), user researcher, and two subject-matter experts from our organization.
To make things go more smoothly and to keep us on track, I assigned myself as facilitator and assigned one of our subject-matter experts as the decision maker. Having one person serve as the key decision maker allowed us to quickly wrap up at the end of each section.
1. Understand
In this first phase, we worked together to map out the problems and create shared knowledge before we jump into problem-solving.
Lightning Talks
4 minutes
First, each person had one minute to talk about their main concerns or questions they had coming into the project so we knew what was top of mind for everyone.
How Might We
11 minutes
I took two minutes to explain how this section works and then we spent nine minutes individually writing down our thoughts on post-its and turning them into statements that begin with the phrase “How might we…”. For example, “How might we express the value of DonorsChoose.org without over-promising?” This method of note-taking allowed us to reframe the concerns we shared during our Lightning Phase into opportunities (without getting stuck in the weeds about solutions just yet).
Affinity Mapping & Voting
15 minutes
We read our post-its aloud and stuck them up, grouping like ones together as we read them aloud.
The major groups we saw were
How Might we…
- …bring in more teachers?
- …give ourselves credit?
- …give partners credit?
- …give strangers credit?
- …give teachers credit?
- …not accidentally take credit?
- …make sure this works for all teachers?
- …use data and details to inspire?
We then voted (the yellow stickies) on individual cards that jumped out at us so we could see which ones were most compelling to us as a group. A few that were highlighted were:
How Might We…
- …get teachers to feel like we’re working together?
- …give our corporate and foundation partners credit while also getting credit for connecting them to our teachers?
- …not accidentally take credit for donations that came in through the teacher?
Customer Journey Mapping
15 minutes
As a group, we mapped out a teacher’s first step into the DonorsChoose.org ecosystem through a typical project lifecycle. We went step by step and highlighted pain points and points of opportunity, so we could consider all of the different places where we could approach this problem.
Goals & Success Metrics
15 minutes
We took a step back to think about the big picture: At the end of the day, what was it that we wanted teachers to do? What problem were we actually trying to solve?
As a group, we wrote out three different ideas, but “Compare us favorably to competitors” stood out most to us. We realized that it had not mattered to us that teachers didn’t understand how much money we brought to the table until we were worried about losing them to our competitors. The metrics we would gather to see if we end up meeting this goal would come from qualitative research around 1) whether teachers were more willing to use us than our competitors, 2) understand why teachers use us vs. competitors, and 3) How teachers rank us compared to other crowdfunding sites.
2. Sketch
During our sketch phase, individual team members were given time and space to brainstorm solutions on their own. Because this is a problem with so many potential solutions, we wanted to make sure we looked beyond our initial ideas.
Present Comparable Problems
10 minutes
To first give us a little inspiration, we discussed different ways other companies and industries have approached similar problems. In this case, we were curious about how others had drawn attention to their value props.
Crazy Eights
8 minutes
Each person then folded up a piece of paper into eight different squares. Then for eight minutes, we individually sketched out eight different ideas. The purpose of this ultra-fast sketching exercise was to try to come up with a variety of very different ideas so we had to push past our first idea, which was usually not the most creative one.
Not everyone was super comfortable drawing, so we encouraged descriptions and notes as well.
Ideas that came out of this exercise ranged from simple copy tweaks, to pie-charts showing a project’s funding breakdown, to a report card for teachers. They were fast and loose, which is exactly what we wanted to get out of this step in the sprint.
Share
15 minutes
We each pinned up our sketches so everyone could see them and then described them, one by one. Each person had three minutes to talk about the ideas they sketched and to answer any questions that came up.
Vote
10 minutes
Each person was able to vote for three different ideas (individual sketches, not whole sheets of paper) that they liked. The voting helped people understand what ideas were most compelling to the group.
Solution Sketch
20 minutes
Each individual then chose an idea (theirs or someone else’s) to flesh out more fully. We had 20 minutes to spend doing a deep dive into our ideas and creating a fuller sketch. Some people sketched out more than one idea because some of the ideas were simple emails or text changes.
3. Prototype
In a longer design sprint, team members create a quick prototype they can actually test on users. Since our design sprint was much shorter, we used this time to decide which ideas we wanted to prototype and design out further.
Mapping Impact vs. Effort
10 minutes
Some of our sketches were made up of two or more ideas (we’re fast sketchers!), so we broke each idea out into a separate sticky note. We mapped out our ideas on a spectrum of impact vs. effort to see where we should try to put our resources.
Voting
10 minutes
We voted again and decided to put our time and resources into prototyping out two ideas:
- Animation on the teacher’s homepage: Creating a warm and fuzzy illustrative callout in the teacher’s homepage to let them know who supported their projects and break down the funding for them.
- “We’re in it together” Email: Send an email to a teacher after we share their project in our monthly email sends to let them know about the work we’ve done to bring in more donors.
Reflections
Overall, this process was helpful and gave us a good head start on our project, but it could be refined.
What I Would Do Differently Next Time
More pre-work: I had everyone come to the table with the knowledge they already had and didn’t ask people to do any pre-work. I falsely thought we could create enough shared-knowledge during our lightning talks. However, one-minute was not enough time for us to lend each other the expertise we came in with. I would recommend having each team member share out prior research/notes/thoughts before the design sprint.
Allot extra time for transitions: We thought this would take us about two hours, but it ended up taking us close to three. I added in the Mapping Impact vs. Effort section and some extra voting sessions on the fly when I felt like that was needed. We also needed extra time for transitioning between exercises and, at one point, we lost a conference room to another team. All of this meant that the total sprint took longer than anticipated.
Actually prototype: Our “Prototype” phase was more of a decision making tool than actually prototyping. Next time, I’d skip the Impact vs. Effort mapping and try using that time to make paper-prototypes that we could then test—even if it was just on others within our org.
Bite-Sized Sprint for a Bite-Sized Project
Our 3-hour sprint was just the right size for this particular problem that we were trying to solve. When we set out to solve a larger problem, we’d likely benefit from a longer sprint, if not a full 5-day sprint.
For resource-constrained teams, I’d recommend starting with a 3-hour sprint before committing the amount of time required for a full 5-day sprint. See what works for you and if there’s something missing, you can add additional sections from the Design Sprint Kit. There’s a spectrum between the 3-hour sprint and a 5-day sprint, and you should experiment to see what works for your team and project.
